We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.Find out moreJump to
Content

Benjamin Chang

The communities that constitute the racialized category of Asian Americans consist of approximately 20 million people in the United States, or about 5% of the total population. About 20% ...
More

The communities that constitute the racialized category of Asian Americans consist of approximately 20 million people in the United States, or about 5% of the total population. About 20% or 4 million are of primary or secondary school age, and over 1.1 million are in higher education. Both in popular and academic discourse, “Asian American” generally refers to people who have ethnic backgrounds in South Asia (e.g., Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (e.g., Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam), and East Asia (e.g., China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan). As “Asian American” is an umbrella term used to categorize a very diverse, heterogeneous, and transnational set of populations, Asian Americans as a group present various challenges to education and research in and about the United States. These challenges can concern paradigms of achievement, citizenship, family involvement, access (e.g., higher education, bilingual education), language and culture, race and ethnicity, and school community.

In order to address these paradigmatic challenges, a great deal of scholarship has called for a disaggregation of the data on populations that fall under the pan-ethnic “Asian America” umbrella term, to gain a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the many diverse populations and their historical, cultural, economic, and political experiences. To further address the problematic framing of Asian Americans in education and related fields, scholars have applied critical lenses to key tensions within conceptualization, policy, curriculum, and pedagogy. More recently, the notions of intersectionality and transnationalism have been generative in the study of Asian Americans, within not only educational research but also Asian American studies, which generally falls under the field of ethnic studies in the U.S. context, but has also been categorized under American studies, cultural studies, or Asian studies. While characterizations of Asian Americans as “the Model Minority” or “the Oppressed Minority” persist, the relevance of such static binaries has increasingly been challenged as the Asian American populations and migrations continue to diversify and increase.

Lauren Bialystok

Authenticity is a concept with an impressive history in Western philosophy and a significant hold on the modern imagination. Inseparable from conceptions of truth and individual ...
More

Authenticity is a concept with an impressive history in Western philosophy and a significant hold on the modern imagination. Inseparable from conceptions of truth and individual fulfillment, authenticity remains a powerful ideal, even as it eludes precise definition. Recently it has also become an organizing principle for many educational initiatives. Education, like authenticity, is opposed to dissimulation, ignorance, manipulation, and related states of misalignment between truth and experience. There is widespread enthusiasm for the promotion of authenticity across different types of education and in the personal identity of educators and students. Most of the scholarly literature pertaining to authenticity in education falls outside the scope of philosophical inquiry. But in all cases, the pursuit of authenticity in education rests on various philosophical assumptions about the nature of truth, reality, ethics, and, ultimately, the aims of education.

With the influence of Dewey and 20th-century progressive movements in education, authenticity entered the vernacular of educational theory and practice. Attention to the relationship between learning environments and the “real” world has generated pervasive commitments to authentic learning, authentic pedagogies, authentic curriculum, and authentic assessment practices. Here, “authenticity” is used to track the verisimilitude of an educational practice with respect to some external reality. It constitutes an ontological claim about levels of “reality,” as well as an epistemological attitude toward learning as the construction of knowledge. In this respect, authenticity intersects debates about constructivism and relativism in education. Likewise, teachers are exhorted to be authentic qua teachers, elevating their true selves above institutional anonymity as a key part of effective teaching. This phenomenon trades on the values of truthfulness and autonomy that are prized in Western modernity but also problematized in the personal identity and ethics literature. The authenticity of students has also been championed as an educational aim, even as the methods for eliciting authenticity in others have been criticized as self-defeating or culturally limiting. Personal authenticity stands in a contested relationship to autonomy, which has been promoted as the key aim of liberal education. The project of creating authentic people through education remains an intense site of research and debate, with important implications for educational ethics and liberal values.

Anne Harris and Leon De Bruin

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
...
More

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.

Creativity is an essential aspect of teaching and learning that is influencing worldwide educational policy and teacher practice, and is shaping the possibilities of 21st-century learners. The way creativity is understood, nurtured, and linked with real-world problems for emerging workforces is a significant aspect of the way in which contemporary scholars and educators now approach creativity in schools. Creativity research commonly attends to creative ability, influence, and assessment along three broad themes: the physical environment, the pedagogical environment, and the role of partnerships in and beyond the school that emphasize the connectivity between individual and environment, self and others, and creator and culture.

Research on scholarship in creativity in education explores teachers’ practices, environments, curriculum, pedagogies, and organizational structures, identifying aspects of educational practice that both facilitate and impede creativity. Global trends and discourse in current creativity research distinguish measurably different approaches from traditional forms of “doing,” “knowing,” and “assessing.” They inform practicing and pre-service teachers, schools, and policy makers of the need to educationally innovate experiential dimensions, priorities, possibilities, and new kinds of partnerships in creativity education.

Vivian Maria Vasquez

Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has ...
More

Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has resulted in new definitions of what it means to be literate and how to teach literacy. Today, more than ever, we need frameworks for literacy teaching and learning that can withstand such shifting conditions across time, space, place, and circumstance, and thrive in challenging conditions. Critical literacy is a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world. It begins with the roots of critical literacy and the Frankfurt School from the 1920s along with the work of Paulo Freire in the late 1940s (McLaren, 1999; Morrell, 2008) and ends with new directions in the field of critical literacy including finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies, engaging with spatiality- and place-based pedagogies, and working across the curriculum in the content areas in multilingual settings. Theoretical orientations and critical literacy practices are used around the globe along with models that have been adopted in various state jurisdictions such as Ontario, in Canada, and Queensland, in Australia.

David R. Cole

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
Gilles ...
More

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a French philosopher who wrote about literature, art, cinema, other philosophers, capitalism, and schizophrenia. His wide-ranging oeuvre has begun to be considered seriously in education, because his ideas act as springboards for further elaboration and application in connected areas such as research, learning theory, curriculum, and policy studies. While it is impossible to track exactly how, when, and indeed if “Deleuze Studies in Education” will mature and progress to occupy a mainstream position in education, it is worth considering the influence of the French thinker as a mode of renewal and new thought. The questions that concern Deleuze Studies in Education therefore shift from positing thought from the known to what can be done.

Deleuze’s solo work acts a basis for new thinking in the philosophy of education. His series of philosophical studies track and develop a new philosophy that redraws Western concepts of the subject, knowledge, learning, and thought. The intent of this new philosophy is to open up fixed Western ideas to their international and historical counterparts and to produce a way of thinking that occupies a middle ground, disconnected from the dominant, intellectual empire building that has predominantly hailed from the West.

Deleuze’s writing with the French intellectual activist Félix Guattari (1930–1992) takes on a distinct shift and urgency away from the rewriting of the Western philosophical tradition until their last joint work: What Is Philosophy? Deleuze Studies in Education is deepened and reinvented through their dual work and is transformed into a mode of critical capitalist studies, adding historical/subjective valence to how one understands current shifts in educational practice.

Last, the specific oeuvre of Félix Guattari, who is often less investigated and focused upon in education than Deleuze, serves as a pressing and ethical engagement with theory that can be readily applied to issues such as environmental concerns, inequality, power, and activism. Guattari’s ideas are present as a lasting aspect of Deleuze Studies in Education because they demonstrate many of the links to practice that Deleuze theorized throughout his philosophy.

Kathleen Gallagher, Rachel Rhoades, Sherry Bie, and Nancy Cardwell

The field of drama education and applied theater is best understood through a consideration of the major developments and aspirations that have shaped its trajectory over three historical ...
More

The field of drama education and applied theater is best understood through a consideration of the major developments and aspirations that have shaped its trajectory over three historical periods: the latter years of the 19th century up until 1960, between 1960 and 1990, and the years encompassing the turn of the 21st century, 1990–2015, which was a decidedly more globalized epoch. The drama education/applied theater scholarship of the English-speaking world, including the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and North America, offers a fascinating distillation of the relationship between making drama and learning, including the history of alternative forms of education. Scholarship from Asia drawing on traditional forms of theater-making, as well as imported and adapted structures of Western drama education movements, speak to hybrid and ever-expanding practices across the globe.

Although young as a discipline within the academy, drama education/applied theater has all but made up for its relative immaturity by spanning a wide domain of multidisciplinary thinking, embracing an eclectic theoretical field that covers an enormous breadth of social issues and a vast range of learning theories, while straddling a compelling spectrum of political positions. The development of the field is infused with pioneering ideas that broke with entrenched historical traditions and habitual ways of learning, harkening toward new ways of thinking, being, relating, and creating. Taking the world as its source material and humanity as its target audience, the history of the progressive discipline of drama education/applied theater tells the story of an ambitious, flawed, idealized, politicized, divisive, and deeply humanistic scholarly and practice-driven field.

Rubina Saigol

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
For ...
More

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.

For decades now, the discourse on women and education by states, governments, non-governmental organizations, and global development agencies has focused overwhelmingly on access. The excessive preoccupation with enrollment rates, dropout rates, and impediments and constraints on women’s access to education has led to a relative neglect of what access is and what kind of access is being provided. Is it benign, empowering, liberating, and emancipating? Or is it rather that the messages transmitted through schooling tend to serve ends other than women’s own agency and empowerment? The case for educating girls and women is often couched in an instrumental vocabulary centered on the idea that it is good for the state, nation, country, motherhood, family, community, economic growth, and development. Such utilitarian arguments overlook the idea that education is a basic human right, and the aim of women’s education should be to empower women themselves, for their own sake, instead of as a means to ends outside of themselves.

The underlying assumption in instrumental and utilitarian arguments is that what is taught in schools—the curriculum—is neutral and objective and empowers all those who are exposed to it. There is little understanding, especially among policymakers and bureaucrats, that curriculum is not neutral or impartial; rather it is a highly contested, contradictory, and conflicted space with various social groups (religious, sectarian, nationalist, ethnic, racist, or other) attempting to gain the inclusion of their own knowledge as the only legitimate one. The old questions in education—whose knowledge is legitimate knowledge, and who decides which knowledge to include from a vast universe of available knowledge—is as relevant today as it was when first posited. In other words, what a society, community, or nation decides to transmit as “the truth” and what it prefers to exclude are highly political decisions steeped in conflicts over hegemony and power.

One of the most dominant and hegemonic discourses, historically and in contemporary times, is patriarchy. The belief that men/masculinity and women/femininity are polar opposites, and that the former category is overall superior to the latter, which is subordinate to it, is a universal ideology that informs the discourses of the nation, state, family, development, and all the institutions of governments, states, and the global community. Patriarchal ideas, values, and practices enter into capitalist, neoliberal, nationalist, religious, and cultural narratives across the globe and adapt to the system in place. Feminism and Women’s Studies have unpacked patriarchal discourses by revealing masculine biases in the very construction, packaging, and distribution of knowledge. However, feminist knowledge is mostly ghettoized in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies Departments, without forming the essential core of the curriculum in all social, humanistic, and hard science disciplinary areas. Under pressure from human rights and women’s rights constituencies, some content may be added or deleted from the curricula and textbooks, but the dominant religious, nationalist, and neoliberal discourses remain devoid of the insights of feminism that have provided new ways of conceptualizing the world and transforming it into a place of greater justice and equality.

Catherine Doherty and Megan Pozzi

While meritocratic ideals assume a level playing field for educational competition, those who can may seek to tilt the field in their children’s favor to ensure better educational ...
More

While meritocratic ideals assume a level playing field for educational competition, those who can may seek to tilt the field in their children’s favor to ensure better educational opportunities and the associated life rewards. A growing body of literature is researching “up” to better understand how advantage for some through the choice of elite or private schooling contributes to the relative disadvantage of others. Institutional claims to offering an “elite” education can rest on different logics such as social selectivity by dint of high fees or academic selectivity by dint of enrollments conditional on academic excellence. Private education provided by a non-government entity serves as an alternative to public sector provision for those who can afford it. The global spread of neoliberal metapolicy has fanned a general trend towards privatization. Such logics of social restriction can distinguish the whole school, niche programs of distinction within a school, or tracking practices that pool advantage in particular classes or subjects. While education policy debates wrestle with how to articulate competing ethics of excellence, inclusivity, and equity, elite branding unapologetically resolves these tensions by conflating excellence and exclusivity. To achieve and sustain elite status, however, relies on the extra work of carefully curating reputations and protecting the brand. Recent research has started to ask more difficult questions of educational privilege. Such research helps to understand: the curricular processes and nature of privilege achieved through elite and private educational choices; how such education harnesses the semblance of meritocratic competition to legitimate its forms of distinction; and the broader impact of these processes.

Karri Holley

Interdisciplinary curricula provide students the opportunity to work with knowledge drawn from multiple disciplines. Following suit, interdisciplinary learning requires interaction of ...
More

Interdisciplinary curricula provide students the opportunity to work with knowledge drawn from multiple disciplines. Following suit, interdisciplinary learning requires interaction of knowledge from different disciplines; integration of knowledge from different disciplines; and an overarching topic, theme, or problem that shapes the learning experience. Since the university curriculum is commonly structured by academic disciplines, and faculty are socialized to their respective disciplinary norms, interdisciplinarity is a complex endeavor for colleges and universities. These endeavors include developing interdisciplinary courses, sustaining interdisciplinary initiatives, and financing interdisciplinary programs.

Given the multiple challenges facing 21st-century society, the question of interdisciplinarity is urgent. How knowledge is defined and disseminated; how and what students learn; and how higher education can be responsive to its external environment are crucial issues facing educators. Responding to these issues does not diminish the role of the discipline in education, but rather acknowledges that knowledge is unbounded and potential discoveries lie outside compartmentalized structures.

Tim Loreman

A number of different pedagogical approaches have been presented as being helpful for teachers working with students in inclusive learning environments. These approaches were developed in ...
More

A number of different pedagogical approaches have been presented as being helpful for teachers working with students in inclusive learning environments. These approaches were developed in the late 20th century and were largely derived from models of special education. Many of them are still evident in classrooms around the world today. Based on approaches that appear to have been effective, a set of principles for the development and implementation of inclusive education pedagogy, as identified in the academic literature, can be discerned. These principles, however, are best viewed through a critical lens that highlights cautions for teachers engaged in inclusive teaching. Examples of inclusive approaches that align with some basic principles of inclusive pedagogy include but are not limited to Differentiated Instruction, Universal Design for Learning, and Florian and Spratt’s (2013) Inclusive Pedagogical Approach in Action framework.